More J.S. Bach cantatas? Yes, and that’s good news not just for Bach devotees but for psychotherapists who stand to profit from the guilt that some (though not all) cantatas can induce among those who take them too literally.
After centuries of neglect, Bach cantatas are becoming a regular part of the concert landscape, thanks to Bach@1 at New York’s Trinity Church at Wall Street and Choral Arts Philadelphia’s Bach@7, which mixes cantatas with music by other composers of Bach’s time.
The 4X4 Baroque Music Festival, slightly uptown from Holy Trinity at St. Paul’s Chapel, had four concerts over last weekend: I caught the Sunday Sept. 14 From Darkness into Light that had a 14-piece orchestra and four vocal soloists for Bach’s Nimm von uns, Herr, du treuer Gott, BWV 101 (which begs God to take away the punishment we all deserve) and Wir mussen durch viel Trubsal BWV 146 (about entering the kingdom of God through sorrow). Yet I emerged from this wonderful concert guilt-free.
These particular cantatas are expansively composed and richly scored. The performances were conductorless (led from the organ by Avi Stein), making them chamber music of the best sort and avoiding the kind of contained, over-thought, tautly controlled performances I’ve heard from John Eliot Gardiner. I might even call the concert a conversion moment: Even though I revere J.S. Bach above all other composers, the cantatas have always been works I’ve been happy to encounter in concerts but are close to the bottom of my personal playlist.
So sue me or let scholar Richard Taruskin come after me with a pitchfork: He famously wrote in the New York Times several years ago that if you don’t know the cantatas, you don’t know Bach. I agree. But as one who has heard a lion’s share of them and has even sung a handful in earlier years, I have to ask: Must we love them as well? Or even like them? Or do the cantatas not allow that with their religious severity?
Musically, they’re very much a laboratory, an enclave of non-codified Bach, never going down a blind alley but taken roads less-often traveled and masterfully recycling his own music to express the texts with earnest specificity. The music can also feel like first thoughts, not rough drafts but half-frozen improvisations that go to more expressive extremes.
The down side is that the genre itself and the world that the cantatas comes from can seem awfully remote, with their finger-wagging texts and brutal reminders that the world isn’t a nice place and that human beings are hopelessly flawed. This is music with no responsibilities to engage audiences in any modern sense. Bach’s church-bound audience was as captive as can be. Applause wasn’t in the cards no matter how good or less-good the piece came out.
In my Opera News piece (July 2014) about the Gardiner book, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, I marveled at what an unstoppable creative impetus must have powered these cantatas, since so many of them were written during his Leipzig period were under a veil of disillusionment with the people he had to deal with and the forces he was given to work with. In BWV 101, written for Bach’s second cantata cycle in Leipzig that Gardiner describes as the composer surpassing himself, great wind writing is everywhere, like a Brandenburg Concerto with voices, not just in the obbligatos but in the deft use of wind choirs within the orchestra. In a group as small as 4X4’s, one hears every addition and subtraction of instruments, along with their expressive impact and technical ingenuity.
BWV 146 is even more ambitious, The opening Sinfonia is also the first movement of Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in d minor – the solo role transferring well to organ, especially as played by Avi Stein. The amazing opening chorus, sung by the soloists with one voice to a part, was built around a downward-slanted, two-note sighing motif though with so much else built around it. Revisiting the chorus in a Helmut Rilling performance, much of the greatness was lost in a mass of choral sound. Even compared to more historically responsible recordings, the 4X4 performance had a particularly enveloping aura.
Elsewhere in the cantata, the music was full of instrumental writing that’s not just sophisticated but let you into a world that felt quite separate from all the grave, admonishing texts. In a way, the effect was subversive, with Bach showing how good earthly life can be in his land of endless musical possibilities. Growing up Roman Catholic, I remember sitting through hell-fire Sunday sermons, tugging at my mom’s sleeve and whispering, “Does he mean me?” Mom always assured me that he did not. In a way, that’s what Bach’s instrumental writing tells me. If you’re thinking of parallels with Shostakovich and his language of double messages….I am, too.
The vocal writing has a similar but more muted effect: It tows the hellfire-and-brimstone party line but does so with animated invention that subverts all grimness. The singers, including Mireille Asselin, Kirsten Solik and Steven Caldicott Wilson were all well-matched and text attentive, with bass-baritone Jesse Blumberg projecting the words in especially buoyant ways, accentuating the music’s subversive quality. He also has a way of creating an illusion that he’s singing directly to you. The only other singer I know with that gift, at least on this level of artistry, is the Canadian mezzo Susan Platts. Imagine the two of them together.
Nice posting, David! Bach redemption is at hand.
Bach developed a language of Christ-coding that is hidden, much like the Spirit that is embedded within them, as I think of the Apostle’s great insight: “For your lives are hidden in Christ with God.” Bach was all too sensitive truly to the jeopardy faced by the depth of his spiritual penetration, in this perilous life, and had an otherly language, his music, to both conceal and reveal it. As Auden wrote in his poem, “The Composer,” “all the others translate…. from life to art by painstaking adaption, relying on us to cover the rift, only your notes are pure contraption, only your song is an absolute gift.”
Einstein told us, above all, to be quiet when listening to Bach. I believe him: the greater the stillness within, the more of the code we can assimilate.
Jack Bruce, the bassist of “Cream,” said he learned how to write bass lines for the group, from his studies of Bach Cantatas at the Guildhall School of Music, and to avoid simplistic accompaniment writing. He was probably the first really seminal rock composer who learned the art from Bach of writing bass that was a contrapuntal line unto itself, and not just mere “backup.”
I was glad to hear how much you revere Bach. Me too. Bach is the Gospel of Music, he writes for the Holy Muse, who is God, encoded in sound. And God SAID, “Let there be Light.” The Sound of God’s Voice preceded the visible world. Bach would know about that.
David, You arrive at some odd conclusions; although you love and revere and appreciate this music as well as anyone. There has been a shift in sensibility as a result of the development of the human species. Bach was as enlightened as anyone in his day and had a mystical sensibility, which meant that (as is obvious from the inspiration brimming in all the cantatas, which can’e actually be said for ALL the organ works) he was frequently composing almost in the presence of God (exactly how much is something no-one except he knew). That explains the magnificence of the entire genre, which should not be seen to exclude the Lutheran organ music,almost all amazingly creative and something no-one else even approached, not even Mozart. The shift in sensibility means that you can safely avoid re-running James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, and – I hope – avoid coming to Joyce’s incredibly dense conclusions.
I owe it to a brilliant, cultured American art scholar, Barry Kaplan (in 1977 investigating the illuminated manuscripts of the Corbie scriptorium and also working as a translator of art books, living in the Latin Quarter) the insight that Christianity is still the hidden golden braid running through our civilization. He’d of course read Saint Bernard: we were in fact discussing Thomas Merton, another great American seer. I’d thought oriental religions might offer a better worldview, but Barry was saying: no, it’s a synthesis. And Merton, at the time of his accidental electricution by a Bangkok fan, was onto some insights which were upsetting the Church no end.
I looked up to Barry and he influenced me, although it took years for this theme to play itself out. The trouble with
comments like ‘this is music with no responsibilities to engage audiences in any modern sense’ is the poverty of your conception of the potential of ‘modern’. Individuals, I am sure, do exist today with the potential and sensitivity to explore spiritually and come close to God, much as Bach, Mozart – and in their different ways, people like Beethoven and Elgar did, but our culture is not sending them any but the most nihilistic signals as to the chief ends and purposes of man.
And it’s also, obvious, that it’s not Bach who is out of step, if we feel like this about it, but ourselves… It’s our job to understand him, not his to dumb down to us….
Do not forget he had to write cantatas was it weekly, and these were the set texts. It would indeed have been surprising if he had come up with things more secular (though he wrote charming secular cantatas too, as you know…)
All we need to do is put on, say, the last movement of the second Brandenburg, the wonderful cantata with the trumpet obbligato, or say the Wedge Prelude and Fugue…and all our worries about modern man melt into their true perspective.
Life has always been puzzling and difficult and mysterious to great thinkers down the ages, from Lao Tzu and Saint Paul to Rembrandt, Einstein, Sartre, you know them all! They can but make of life what they see around them at the time, and be necessarily limited (as we are limited) by the optic of our time.
Night vision glasses may not be available. So really, you are looking out to find something impossible to find – if you seriously discern in Bach’s music anything – even for a bar – which restricts, is to be regretted, or hems us in. No – it’s all a divine tapestry, endlessly energizing and enriching (I remember we had a school maths teacher utterly transfixed by the cantatas, had them all on vinyls, masses of them, played them all the time. a quiet, softly-spoken man). It may well be these which us from despair as we lie on our deathbed. (Though the CPE BACH ones are amazing too!). Glory everlasting to Bach and to the God who inspired him – who is still with us today! Would be a sad world if he were not!
And no (anticipating comments) it’s not a question of ‘belief’. There’s nothing intellectual here. It’s just what you find in even one bar of the music, a kind of watermark, if you lake!
It just doesn’t get any better than that!